Kevin Yu the Nymphéas

To reconcile geometrical art and lyric abstraction

What does it occur when one wants to reconcile geometrical art and lyric abstraction? What to wait of an artist who despizing borders mixes freedom with the gesture and the mathematical rigour? Can one paint while claiming himself at the same time of Pollock and Mondrian? Kevin Yu punctuates his fabrics of squares white or red and small photographs. The fabrics of its last exposure have as a title “Oils on fabric and joining 2006”. It connects the pure abstraction of painting and a certain reality of the image. It is what can make say that it connects two worlds inconcilable. By an English first name, imposed by the school, and a Chinese patronym, Yu Chen Feng says Kevin Yu, born in Taiwan in 1956, was already at the borders of two civilizations. On fabric or wood, it works in the thousand-year-old tradition of the superposition of the lacquers and the fulgurance of the gesture hundred times repeated until the perfection. Only one blow of brush and the silhouette is registered on the roller which is held at the time of the great ceremonies. The feature becomes landscape, breath and force contained. Raised in the tradition confucéenne, Kevin Yu does not escape the attraction from the Occident, it unloads in Paris in 1981 without knowing a word of French and discovers finally the masterpieces of the large Masters of which it knew only reproductions. It is grabbed by the city. It invents a work where on the filigree of a gestural painting the fragments of another world are grafted, photographic squares, windows of the future open on a reducing past where the memory dissolves in the fulgurating space of the moment.
There remains very insulated in a world where only exists painting where he distils year after year the emotions which crosses it. The contrast which it saw with the daily newspaper between Far East and France, it endeavours to integrate it in its pictorial universe, reflection of its internal conflicts in abstract fabrics by a juxtaposition of surfaces and matters where a universe is redefined. Successive layers, tumultuous sedimentations, cover the fabric in the full movement with gestural controlled by a geometry as rigorous as that of Mondrian where spaces are superimposed as in the fabrics of Cézanne whose it recognizes the influence explicitly.

Born in 1956 in Taiwan, Kevin Yu unloads in Paris without knowing a word of French, it speaks Chinese and knows a little English. This world, our world, it discovers it by the image, its place of predilection becomes Louvre where it is impregnated with all the traditional ones that it knew hitherto only by more or less good reproductions and some too rare exposures.

Kevin Yu punctuates his fabrics of squares white or red. Starting from a painting of the vacuum, it seeks the origin, creation, frangible joint; a connection between Chinese traditional painting and the modernism of the Western abstraction… of the bottom of its major blacks emerges a sky of ideas to cutting as subtle as the mountains of Guilin in against day of a raising sun. The pictorial world of Kevin Yu was always controlled by a paramount sign which moves the center of it, initially silhouette, then house. In its recent works the references to the mother and time multiply like if in its fabrics the dream of a reconciliation between here and elsewhere, the past and the present became finally reality. Kevin Yu perceives his pictorial work like a private diary, nonnarrative. He opens a new prospect with the spirit for geometry in lyricism selected for his fabrics.

Lélia Mordoch Décembre 1998

Mark Brusse Assembly and Collages (1976-2006)

From January 25, 2007, the gallery presents an exposure dedicated to Mark Brusse, joining together assemblies and joinings of 1976 to our days.

From January 25, 2007, the gallery presents an exposure dedicated to Mark Brusse, joining together assemblies and joinings of 1976 to our days. This work - nourished voyages and meetings, serenity impresses, often tinted humour - testifies to a vision of the readily poetic world. Its step is with the variation and the distance which it grants saves it because it preserves it. Offering, sacrifice, dumb conversation, quiet monologue… it is here a question of presence and interior. Philippe Piguet in catalogue Answer in question, 1992. Sculpture-assembly: Since 1961, installed definitively in Paris, Mark Brusse conceives the series of the Fences, Soft Machines and Strange Fruits, assemblies of objects out of wooden of recovery and various metals found in the street, which tell the history of elements met by chance and gathered according to the imagination of the artist to live a new life together. At that time, it attends the New Realistic ones joined together around Pierre Restany like his friends Robert Filliou and… From January 25, 2007, the gallery presents an exposure dedicated to Mark Brusse, joining together assemblies and joinings of 1976 to our days. This work - nourished voyages and meetings, serenity impresses, often tinted humour - testifies to a vision of the readily poetic world. Its step is with the variation and the distance which it grants saves it because it preserves it. Offering, sacrifice, dumb conversation, quiet monologue… it is here a question of presence and interior. Philippe Piguet in catalogue Answer in question, 1992. Sculpture-assembly: Since 1961, installed definitively in Paris, Mark Brusse conceives the series of the Fences, Soft Machines and Strange Fruits, assemblies of objects out of wooden of recovery and various metals found in the street, which tell the history of elements met by chance and gathered according to the imagination of the artist to live a new life together. At that time, it attends the New Realistic ones joined together around Pierre Restany like his friends Robert Filliou and Daniel Spoerri. 1965, two years stay in New York where, influenced by the minimalist spirit of the moment, his work takes a new dimension. The purification of the forms and the colors are necessary to the evolution of its language (series Natural Wood and Floor Pieces, geometrical parts out of wooden paints or not). It joins again with the Fluxus group known for its attachment with the character event-driven and transitory of work, which leads Brusse to take part in several happenings and especially to collaborate with the musician John Cage. These artistic experiments give him the taste of the “Environment”, i.e. installations adapted to space given, (Occupation of Space, volumes out of wooden which entirely fill the interior of the rooms, thus blocking the access, Kunsthalle of Bern in 1968). After a stay in Berlin at the beginning of the Seventies, Mark Brusse returns to Paris and settles with the Hive. It creates assemblies, small or large, some on base, others suspended, consisted of the most various materials: filament, node, cord which is used as discussion thread, one could almost speak about umbilical cord. However, one finds there especially wood. The selected titles are often poetic, mysterious, sometimes ironic. It is at that time that the Dutch shoe appears in its work (Puget Sound, 1976; Knot-Thing, 1987; I cuts has nail in my Shoe, 1976). Artist pérégrin, Mark Brusse traverses the animated world of an insatiable curiosity. The sculptures carried out these ten last years are impressed of this itinérance. They make a synthesis of all that the artist met on his road during previous years. Out of wood whitewashed gross of pure white, often of large size, they make a reflexion on the world and the life seen by the artist: the time which passes that it tries to retain, the rustle of the flight of the butterfly which it solidifies forever or the white feather of which it monopolizes lightness in the transparency of glass (The White Moment, 2001; The Shape of Silence, 2003). Joining: Although joining has played an important part in its work for several years, it is during a stay in Japan in 1983, that he knows his full blooming. According to the principle of recovery which it adopted as of its arrival in Paris, Mark Brusse seeks the elements of its joinings in the street. It ensures besides: I found them in the street, I found what at the bottom existed already in me. Its interest goes on bits of paper with Japanese writings which it sometimes associates objects, vestimentary elements, in particular of the gloves. The compositions are sober; they carry the mark of the tradition Zen because Asian civilization strongly influences work.

Collage Galerie Cadenas Bellanger

what glue do you use ? Collage to the Galerie Cadenas Bellanger

Exhibition of January 11 to February 10, 2007 Exposure suggested by Yves Brochard.

An exhibition proposed by Yves Borcard

"All books on Dada tells the story of Kurt Schwitters raking the streets of Hanover in search of butts and concert tickets used for his collages; The theory of basic Dada who wants that art can be made from anything equaled the basic theory punk selaon which everyone could make the art "

It is well on one of the reasons, but one would find well of them others, for which one regularly finds the term of joining in all the history of the XXème century. Cubism with aujourd' huii, while passing by dadaism, futurism, surrealism… until impossible to circumvent “the just what is that make todays' S different home so, so appealing?” of Richard Hamilton in 1956, there is some one of works impossible to circumvent and always terribly temporary by this idea of juxtaposition of images, of matters… of different sources and which, Re arranged create a new and always unexpected “situation”. In this introduction, one will surlignera the species of will have which surrounds from now on all these historical works, will have that already André Breton in “point of the day underlined” by evoking the years “which make jauniir the ends of newspapers whose very fresh ink did not contribute little to the insolence of splendid stuck papers of 1913” one will surlignera also the similarity of method in time kind “Tatlin At home” of Raoul Haussmann in 1920 and Richard Hmilton which forty years later, had established for its work of joinings a “programmmatic” kind of classification: man, woman, food, history, newspapers, cinema, instruments domestic, cars, spaces, comic strips, television, telephone, information. One will voluntarily not make distinction between joining, stuck paper, assembly, assembly. on the contrary, in its development, this project perhaps pointed other questions: which images, which porvenances, which construction? The title is not other than the first question put during an interview to one of these English artists who always worked joining: John Stezaker. The exposure on collage to the Workshop Cardenas Bellanger was built like a joining. Various people: artists, galerists, police chiefs… were invited to propose an axis and also names of artists for this project. One should thus see there various perceptions of the topicality but also techniques of what Jean clay called “this genuine explosive device” and which everywhere one murmurs great vitality today: “Yes, thirty years later I am always there with my scalpel, my pile of magazines and my tube of adhesive”.



(1) Greil Marcus "Lispstick traces" Allia Paris 1998

(2) Linder : Dream a little dream of me" Frog n° 4, Paris Automne / Hiver 2006